One of the most important elements of the first meeting with our customers is that we don’t do much talking. We listen. In the end, we’re not here to offer a pre-ordained solution, we’re here to find out what the customer needs and then come up with a solution to solve their problem. So once the customer tells you what they need, that’s when you can start the talking. Only then can you suggest the solution, discuss options and start the process of customising the journey.

Whatever the end goal, you can’t get to a perfect solution without measuring the current state. This is assuming that we have access to some kind of data. Even if the customer’s product is brand new, there are tools like Google Keywords Planner or Google Trends to do some initial competitor research. If your customer already has a web presence, Google Analytics is invaluable for measuring data. We also use Hotjar to create a User Experience (UX) report and Google Data Studio to assess all the most important data in one place.

Whether it’s a simple website or a web app with a complete business management system, the discovery phase is where the custom journey gets up to full speed. We divide this into visual and technical discovery.
Visual discovery is learning about and helping to organise all the information about a customer’s brand, brand guidelines, likes and dislikes. This is sometimes reinforced by very simple design presentations to find out what the customer likes.
Technical discovery is also called scoping. This phase gathers all the required functionality, describes it and puts it in one place (the scope document). This document also becomes your delivery goal as all the functionality described and agreed on by all stakeholders becomes an end-product checklist.

The design phase should use all the above elements to create not only a unique user experience and design, but also to provide a solution to the identified problem. This is often a struggle between the data and the customer’s needs. The ideal solution is a middle ground between what the user is looking for (UX report) and what the customer wants (scope). A great example I frequently bring up relates to the contact form on the top of the homepage. When we did a UX report on one customer’s old website, it turned out that no one ever filled out the form on the home page itself. All converted users automatically clicked on the menu element “contact us” before even looking below the menu. The solution was a middle ground – remove the “contact us” tab on the menu and replace it with a button “enquire” that pops up a contact form without leaving the page.

This part has been already described above. Whether it’s a fully customised CMS or customised Wix website, it’s important to focus on delivering the right solution for the customer. One customer may look for ease of editing; another prefers full automation. Whatever the needs and goals are, the majority of the web development work happens here.

This might be a somewhat unique approach of my business and my philosophy, but as much as I love our customers and love keeping in touch, the last thing any of us would like to hear is “can you please fix that typo on my blog”. It’s not just important for us that the customer has full control of their content and website; it’s also very important for every business to have full control of their product. This might be a landing page, eCommerce, or the web app of a startup fully built on the web. Whatever it is, the customer needs to be in control because otherwise, they become dependent on one developer. That is why we provide training on using the custom solution, plus a manual with full documentation, on every project we do.

Having worked in the Internet industry for most of my life, I know well how things can go wrong. And there are no promises or guarantees in the world that will prevent it. Just like the development process, the handover and go live process need to be customised as well. If it’s a transactional website, the go live plan needs to cause minimal disruption to the system, purchasing, ordering, booking etc. Even with a simple landing page replacement, there has to be a plan for whether the links will change, any redirects, carrying over extra tracking tags from the old website or perhaps simplifying everything by switching to Google Tag Manager. Either way, this part is very important and the customer’s input is needed to ensure it’s as smooth as possible.

This often-forgotten step is an important part in customising the development experience. There is no golden rule and once your web solution is live there will always be something that goes wrong, has been forgotten, or even misspelled. A clear plan of responsibilities, action and support process is very important for every customer. That’s because their online journey hasn’t finished but just started: with constant changes in the Internet and in the industry, the solution that has been developed will constantly evolve. And there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to deal with the problem.